The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

There was evidence that Koresh was a raving madman and there was evidence that he was merely eccentric. There was strong evidence that the compound was a dystopia, but some weak evidence that it was a utopia. There was justification for believing what the federal agents said and justification for questioning their account. By constantly providing people with more and more conflicting data within an essentially static situation, it was possible for the audience to invent whatever narrative they desired. For someone like McVeigh, a radicalized loner naturally sympathetic to the Branch Davidians’ outlook, the ATF’s April 19 attack on the compound was video proof of a political actuality he’d already internalized: He watched tanks being driven through the walls of compound residences while a loudspeaker repeatedly broadcast the phrase “This is not an assault. This is not an assault.” Even in 1993, that level of ironic cognitive dissonance was too much. McVeigh watched the buildings in Waco burn, live on his television, operating from the position that the people inside were innocent. It perpetuated his belief that the loss of innocent lives was acceptable collateral damage in a war he was fighting alone, inside his own mind. It was possible for him to believe this, because it had become possible for anyone to believe anything. It had been this way for a while.